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New submitter IdleThoughts writes "Sometimes it takes a long time to spark a revolution. Long the ugly duckling of programming languages, iOS' Objective-C passed C# in the 'TIOBE Programming Community Index this month and seems on a trajectory to overtake C++ in the next few. It was invented in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, with the idea of creating 'Software Integrated Circuits' and heavily influenced by Smalltalk — yet another legacy from Xerox PARC, along with desktop GUIs, ethernet and laser printers. It was adopted early on by Steve Jobs' NeXTStep, the grand-daddy of all that is now OS X. It had to wait, however, for the mobile device revolution to have its day, being ideally suited to the limited resources on portable devices. It's still being actively developed by Apple and others, sporting the new automatic reference counting and static analysis in the Clang compiler. It turns out it has supported dynamic patching of code in applications all along. What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?"

Theres only one way to find out, and it involves wading through extraordinarily long, unintuitive, and overly verbose object, property, and method names until, Surprise!, you find yet another feature of limited utility.

Worse.A Windows developer developed Norton.Another Windows developer got drunk one night and had all of his humanity removed and wrote Mcafee.Then there was the infamous Windows developer that did Internet Explorer. I heard he started his career of terror by writing THIS [wikipedia.org] program.

Sounds a lot like the Mono vs.NET debacle. There's absolutely nothing that says that Apple won't just come around and sue everybody elses buts off for unlicensed use of Objective-C and Apple's copyrighted APIs.

Oh, come on, Apple isn't going to sue you for using Objective-C. They send you a sympathy card and a case of aspirin.